Memoir is a window into your life. Choose a life experience, shape it into story, and try to make meaning out of it. In this workshop, we will look first at what windows we wish to open, then at how to shape what we see into compelling narrative. We will write a short piece of memoir, in which ultimately we hope to uncover meaning. In so doing, we will respond to today’s urgent call to bear witness through our words.

Susan Tiberghien, an American writer living in Geneva, Switzerland, has published four memoirs—Looking for Gold: A Year in Jungian Analysis; Circling to the Center: One Woman's Encounter with Silent Prayer;Side by Side: Writing Your Love Story;andFootsteps: In Love with a Frenchman—and a highly appreciated writing book, One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer's Art and Craft. She has been an instructor for The Guild since 1990, always impressed by its stature and vision. She also teaches at C.G. Jung Institutes and at writers’ centers and conferences in the States and in Europe, where she directs the Geneva Writers’ Group, an association of over 250 English-language writers.www.susantiberghien.com

The photos we save and the photos we take show what we care about and hope to preserve, what moves and mystifies us, the people, places, stories, and experiences that bring meaning into our lives. In this workshop, we’ll write creatively from personal photos that arrest our attention and unpack why they do. Please bring photos to work from!

Kelly DuMaris a playwright and poet from the Boston area whose recent workshop presentations include the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the Power of Words Conference, True Story Theater, Berkshire Women Writers, Playback North America, and the New England Theatre Conference. She is the author of a nonfiction book, Before You Forget: The Wisdom of Writing Diaries for Your Children, and won the Lit House Press Poetry Chapbook Award for All These Cures. Her newest poetry and prose chapbook, Tree of the Apple, has been published this year by Two of Cups Press. Kelly’s award-winning plays and monologues are produced around the U.S. and Canada. Her award-winning one-act play for youth, The Adventures of Rocky & Skye, was published by Youth Plays. Kelly is a past president of Playwrights’ Platform, Boston, where she led play development activities for many years. She founded and produces the Our Voices Festival of Women Playwrights at Wellesley College.www.kellydumar.com

Memoir as Contemporary Myth

Memoirists are our contemporary myth makers. Myth can be seen as an ordering principle that gives coherence to the way our memories unfold, and the mythic themes of family relationships, quest for identity, love and betrayal, personal sacrifice, and death dominate contemporary memoir writing. In this workshop, you will write a short memoir piece that explores a mythic theme.

Maureen Murdock, Ph.D., is a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist in private practice in Santa Barbara, California. Since 1990, she has taught memoir writing in the UCLA Extensions Writers’ Program, where she received the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in 1995. Her bestselling book, The Heroine’s Journey, explores the rich territory of the feminine psyche and delineates the feminine psycho-spiritual journey. Maureen is also the author of Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind; Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children; and The Heroine’s Journey Workbook. She is the editor of an anthology of memoir writing entitled MondayMorning Memoirs: Women in the Second Half of Life and has published a Kindle short entitled The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder: A Mother’s Perspective. Maureen has written pieces for The Huffington Post on criminal justice and mental illness and has presented short memoir pieces at Center Theater in Santa Barbara and Spark Theater in Los Angeles about the men in prison she works with.Her blog is on her website:www.maureenmurdock.com

All content on this website is copyright protected and may not be reproduced without permission of the IWWG.